The Unforgivable

It is not the initial slight that makes me cut people right the fuck out of my life, but how they navigate the sequence of events afterward. For example, if they think that me calling them on hurting my feelings is fucked up, they can go fuck themselves. Or if they are totally unawares of the absolute need for a simple apology that is not conditional or otherwise an abdication of responsibility. Or if they think my hurt feelings are an overreaction, or if they think I am "too sensitive," or if they think it excuses their fucking bullshit to step back and say "I was only joking," etc. 

I go a long way toward forgiveness for people who have hurt me intentionally or unintentionally if there is respectful process afterward that has space, authenticity and a potential for seeing and honoring. I have precisely zero more time in my life for fuckers who are not capable of this process. And the emphasis in the 12 steps on forgiveness and tolerance is great, as far as it goes, but I have realized that I need only forgive and let go to the extent that I want my own healing process to be vital and enlivening and liberating. Beyond that, I am under absolutely zero fucking obligation to anyone. 

Kindness is all, but the first stage has to be kindness to myself, and the ruthless filtering that arises out of that. I am not able to tell someone else's story accurately, but I am able to honor my own intuition of how I feel after I interact with them, and adjust accordingly. As John Bradshaw put it, what is the necessary distance from someone for me to still be able to love them? That is, if my goal is to love them. I have mde so many excuses and compromised so often for people who either do not get me or are outright hostile to me when I show my vulnerability. Waking up to that causes a lot of both grief and anger. 

A former student of mine posted on FB that she was thinking of cutting a toxic parent out of her life, and I quoted that same thought- what distance would it take for you to still love this parent? There are people in our stories that we do want to continue to love, but then it becomes a question of what distance is necessary for that love to remain, untainted by blazing rage, resentment, annoyance, anger, judgment and fear. For some people in our lives, it is a very great distance indeed. For me, with my own parents, for example, physical distance of 2000 miles or more since 1990, and a few days visiting annually, which has really only become possible in the past 10 years or so. "Don't you love your parents?" some have wondered. Why yes, but from this distance. The very people who fucked me the most fundamentally, the tapes I hear that are the most toxic and belittling, the history of erasure and betrayal and abandonment? Arm's length, ten foot pole, an entire continent, sometimes have not been enough. Nor should they be. "They did their best!" well listen you fucking idiot, their best was not enough, okay? Their best included the central idea that I am an incompetent fool, a weakling, an idiotic child, an annoyance, a burden and a waste of time. Too sensitive. Foolishly emotional. A worthless dreamer. Lazy. Worthy of ridicule. That was their best. And since that time, their best at reaching healing and reconciliation has consisted of childish, unprocessed, weird indirect passive-loving gestures and a refusal to have any kind of actual conversation. I was never worth their time, whether they showed it through outright physical or emotional beatings, or indifference, or misplaced fake affection. When you soak these things up from the very atmosphere from a pre-verbal age, and then you start to acknowledge that they are real for you, and that you have tried to talk yourself out of these truths for decades, and that even your program of recovery encourages you to "get over it," it suddenly becomes amazing that you even continued to speak to them at all, in any way, ever. 

I used to shame myself for being a shitty son, and, looking back on that, it's utterly hilarious. Stockholm Syndrome anyone? Built right into the abuse, that reinforcement of the idea that a healthy, self compassionate and self protective, sane and sound response is immoral or hateful. Absurd but powerful. And when women started to fucking fuck me over the same ways? Abandoning, cheating, lying, ignoring, becoming emotionally distant, rejecting aspects of me that I value, complete with eyerolls and mockery? And then I sought some kind of self validation, admittedly via ineffective aqnd damaging ways sometimes, such as having an affair or looking for validation outside the relationship? I used to shame myself for being a shitty partner too, and looking back, that's just more Stockholm Syndrome fucking bullshit. I am no saint, and when I do seek to connect and get rebuffed, or when I get mocked, or when people refuse to get me or to even try, but they speak love out of their lying goddamned mouths, what do they expect? As Bessie Smith sang almost century ago, "If you don't, I know who will." 


Sometimes it seems to me the worst shit I have done to myself has involved staying with motherfuckers who just did not get me. I've written about it before, here, but it stills sticks in my craw as I work through relationship recovery. Is there any more abyssal moment in life than when one's supposedly most intimate partner doesn't even get a goddamned simple joke? I heard once from a married woman years ago that she was thinking of leaving her husband because he didn't know what a haiku was. Some might see that as extreme but, hot damn, I do not. But when those moments fell through the floor of a lot of the things I had gotten myself into, I would just suck it up, criticize myself, say I was being unreasonable, talk myself out of my crushing loneliness and abandonment, tell myself I had made my bed and had to lie in it. And then, often, create a secret life as a way of "getting my needs met," as a way of getting revenge, as a way of making my self abuse bearable, as a way of living and being alive in a daily grind where my closest intimate seemed to want to stab entire swaths of me to death—and then shame myself for creating that secret life. 

In general, having been raised along such lines, it's no wonder that I have had a re-enactment compulsion of running toward dumpster fires where people had absolutely nothing to give me.